European
Persian Cream Puffs (Noon'e Chamei)
These cream puffs are a completely French invention. They look so perfectly beautiful! My children love filling them with whipped cream—and eating them, of course. These are certainly hard to resist.
Stone-Fruit Sangria
Stone-fruit purée gives this beautifully colored sangria an intensely flavored base that's reinforced with juicy sliced fruit. Choose any combination of the ripest, most fragrant stone fruit (if, say, nectarines aren't looking great, swap in good-looking apricots). Chill the sangria before serving; the flavor will improve the longer it sits—up to two days.
Tomato-Feta Open-Face Sandwich
This simple sandwich's flavor is amped-up with a hit of fresh oregano.
Peach Dutch Baby With Cherry Compote
This puffy, soufflé-like pancake starts in your blender and makes a fantastic dessert—or breakfast. The honey-sweetened compote works well with fresh or frozen cherries.
Peach Melba with Burnt Caramel Sauce
Update classic peach Melba, one of the most enduring creations of Escoffier, by swapping a dark, slightly salty caramel for the customary raspberry sauce. Ripe peaches are essential to the success of this elegant dessert.
Pasta Salad with Melon, Pancetta, and Ricotta Salata
Like the classic combination of melon and prosciutto? Then you'll love this main-course pasta salad.
Turkey Meatball Garlic Bread Heroes
One look at these meatball subs and you might be inclined to bypass an entire summer's worth of burgers and dogs. Heroes, hoagies, subs, grinders—regardless of what you call them, we guarantee this recipe will be an instant crowd favorite thanks to toasted garlic-butter buns piled high with tender meatballs and tangy tomato sauce. Although you may be tempted to head for the grill, opt for your oven broiler instead and avoid the need for skewers or special grill baskets.
Editor's Note: This recipe is part of Gourmet's Modern Menu for Summer Fair Favorites. Menu also includes Fried Onion Dippers with Balsamic Ketchup and Frozen Chocolate-Dipped Bananas with Peanut Brittle.
Niçoise Toasts
Classic salad, meet the open-face sandwich. Our version includes garlic-scented toast and a versatile, new-school egg salad made with cottage cheese, parsley, and capers.
Pasta Carbonara
Cooking your own sauce for this classic Italian dish is easy! Make this dish the star of your meal, or divide up into small ramekins to serve as a side dish.
Arugula and Fontina Frittata
This easy and delicious dish can be served in sliced with toasted points and fresh fruit for a perfect presentation.
Beluga Lentil Caviar on Blini
This appetizer is a total fake-out and a lot of fun to serve. Ellen and Portia absolutely loved these the first time I served them. They both had fond memories attached to caviar, and this recipe brought back those fun times without compromising their vegan diet. Serve these little morsels with a glass of Champagne and share them with some cool friends.
Strawberry-Hibiscus Granita
Want the fluffiest ice? Scrape the frozen mixture with a fork every 30 minutes to create smaller crystals.
Chocolate Semifreddo with Chile-Chocolate Sauce
The keys to a light, airy semifreddo that melts in your mouth? Just enough sugar to sweeten it and keep it soft in the freezer. Also, "gently folding and not overmixing," says Laiskonis. Go over the top by serving it with cinnamon whipped cream and chile-chocolate sauce (or use store- bought chocolate sauce).
Stracciatella - Italian Egg Drop Soup
Eggland’s Best® For more delicious recipes from Eggland’s Best®
Arya's Snitched Tarts
She filched one anyway, and ate it on her way out. It was stuffed with chopped nuts and fruit and cheese, the crust flaky and still warm from the oven. Eating Ser Amory's tart made Arya feel daring. Barefoot surefoot lightfoot, she sang under her breath. I am the ghost in Harrenhal. —A Clash of Kings
Pasta with Garlic-Scape Pesto
Garlic scapes are the soft, lime-green-colored stems and unopened flower buds of hard-neck garlic varieties. Scapes have a mild garlic flavor and a slight sweetness, which makes them a prized addition in the kitchen. You can find them in the early summer and midfall at farmers' markets. If you grow your own garlic (which is easy), trim the scapes off before their flowers open. This forces the plant to focus on bulb production and increases the size of the garlic cloves.
My Aunt Denise introduced me to the idea of garlic-scape pesto. Here I use it to sauce pasta; you can also spread it on crostini or use as a pungent dip for crunchy vegetables. If all you have are salted pistachios, forgo the salt in the recipe and add salt to taste at the end.
Tomato-Basil Sauce with Polenta
Serve this chunky, all-purpose tomato sauce with fish, chicken, pasta, or disks of polenta (shown here).
Baked Tomatoes
This is a gem from my mother's notebook of Nonna Mary's recipes. I remember Nonna Mary serving these tomatoes along with assorted grilled meats during the summer in Cesenatico. They are also a perfect accompaniment to veal cutlets, and together they make a great sandwich, one of my favorite lunches that my mother would pack for me to take to school.
Nonna Mary's Ciambella
When I was growing up in New York, from third grade through high school, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend my summers in Italy. I would stay with my grandmother in Cesenatico, hang out at the beach with my friends, and eat the wonderful food my grandmother cooked. I have never become accustomed to the traditional American breakfast of eggs and fried pork products, or even cereal. Some fresh bread with butter and jam and caffèlatte is my preferred breakfast, with the proportion of coffee to milk increasing as I have gotten older, from just a drop in a large cup of milk when I was little, to mostly coffee with a splash of milk as an adult. But even better than bread and butter is a breakfast sweet such as my grandmother's ciambella. She always seemed to have some on hand. It's very easy to make and keeps wonderfully on the kitchen counter for as long as a week. It may well keep even longer, but I've never been able to resist eating it for long enough to find out. The classic shape of a ciambella is a ring; in fact, there is a saying for when something doesn't work out: non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco, which means, "not all ciambelle come out with a hole." My grandmother always made hers in the shape of a loaf—it was no less delicious for it, and that is how I still prefer to make it.